John McCain’s rough week; watching Barack Obama on a trip that he helped to plan

This week Sen. John McCain’s campaign released a video montage of what they claimed was evidence of a love affair that the media has going on with Sen. Barack Obama. This of course is due to how much television and radio play has come from Obama’s trip to the Middle East and Europe. While a media throng has followed Obama halfway around the globe, one reporter greeted McCain’s airplane at a recent New Hampshire campaign stop.

I concede that the decision of the evening news anchors from CBS, NBC, and ABC to travel with Obama is questionable. But there is no way around the fact that his trip abroad is a newsworthy event.

McCain made a similar trip overseas while the Dems were still fighting it out for the nomination. If his strategists had it to do over again, I’m sure they would have waited until this summer’s lull to have their candidate hop across the Atlantic.

McCain and his party should blame themselves for their part in creating a story about Obama having NOT visited Iraq in quite sometime prior to this week. The GOP even had a running counter of exactly how many days it had been.

So if the Republicans thought it was a big deal that Obama hadn’t been to Iraq, how can they then tell Americans that is going there is not?

David Bauder of the associated press sums up the type of week it’s been for Obama.

Waging the image campaign overseas: Barack Obama has packed his overseas trip with presidential images: a helicopter ride over Iraq with the U.S. military commander; a visit to a Holocaust memorial; a meeting at Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s palace. He even found time to sink a three-point basketball shot before cheering U.S. soldiers.

McCain should learn from Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign that complaining about media bias is not a winning proposition. If he gives voters some fresh ideas, or at least stops getting so mixed up about what’s going on with the economy and abroad, maybe a little more attention will come his way. But for now, he and his folks should sit back and watch this momentum that they helped to create.

Photos from the New York Times.